Billy Budd, Sailor and Bartleby, the Scrivener are two of the most revered shorter works of fiction in history. Here, they are collected along with 19 other stories in a beautifully redesigned collection that represents the best short work of an American master.As Warner Berthoff writes in his introduction to this volume, "It is hard to think of a major novelist or storyteller who is not also a first-rate entertainer ... a master, according to choice, of high comedy, of one or another robust species of expressive humour, or of some special variety of the preposterous, the grotesque, the...

In American Trajectories Warner Berthoff argues that even in the broadest cultural and historical perspective, imaginative literature (like all the arts) is a matter of individual signatures and differences. He also puts forth that there are recognizable patterns and continuities marking off what is distinctively American, what both reflects and speaks for a shared national experience. Discussions of Emily Dickinson and Mark Twain, Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, Kate Chopin, Theodore Dreiser, and Edmund Wilson focus on the provenance and central character of writing by...

Edmund Wilson - American Writers 67 was first published in 1968. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Virtue, as used here, connotes integrity--that living force that issues from persons, societies, or texts in consequence of their accomplishing their distinctive ends. Professor Berthoff outlines the descent of the intuition of virtue from classical times into our own era and examines it as a formative presence in a series of major literary works.

Originally published in 1987.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These...

Hart Crane was first published in 1989. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

More than half a century after his death, the work of Hart Crane (1899-1932) remains central to our understanding of twentieth-century American poetry. During his short life, Crane's contemporaries had difficulty seeing past the "roaring boy" who drank too much and hurled typewriters from windows; in recent years, he has come to be seen as a kind of...